In all my years of being online I've come to really dislike "activity counters". Forums, as much as I'm nostalgic about them, used to have member ranks based on post counts, which also encouraged spamming. Then we've got these points systems in every social media website, making things even worse.
I'm glad devs like you are giving us a way to opt-out from it. Hopefully we can wean off enough people that it won't be a feature anymore (in the future).